A New Christianity for a New World: Why Traditional Faith is Dying & How a New Faith is Being Born

By John Shelby Spong

In his bestselling book Why Christianity Must Change or Die, Bishop John Shelby Spong described the toxins that are poisoning the Church. Now he offers the antidote, calling Christians everywhere into a new and radical reformation for a new age. Spong looks beyond traditional boundaries to open new avenues and a new vocabulary into the Holy, proposing a Christianity premised upon justice, love, and the rise of a new humanity -- a vision of the power that might be.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Oct 13, 2009
• ISBN: 9780061750250

John Shelby Spong

John Shelby Spong, the Episcopal Bishop of Newark before his retirement in 2000, has been a visiting lecturer at Harvard and at more than 500 other universities all over the world. His books, which have sold well over a million copies, include Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy; The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic; Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World; Eternal Life: A New Vision; Jesus for the Non-Religious, The Sins of Scripture, Resurrection: Myth or Reality?; Why Christianity Must Change or Die; and his autobiography, Here I Stand. He writes a weekly column on the web that reaches thousands of people all over the world. To join his online audience, go to www.JohnShelbySpong.com. He lives with his wife, Christine, in New Jersey.

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PREFACE

THE ORIGINS OF THIS BOOK:

FROM HONEST TO GOD TO WHY CHRISTIANITY MUST CHANGE OR DIE

Our coming of age leads us to a true recognition of our situation before God. God would have us know that we must live as those who manage our lives without God. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us. The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continuously. Before God and with God we live without God.

. . . God is weak and powerless in the world and that is precisely the way, the only way in which he is with us to help us.¹

—DIETRICH BONHOEFFER

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There are two tasks that I hope to accomplish with this book. The first is to move forward the work begun in the last century by a man who was my mentor and my friend. His name was John Arthur Thomas Robinson. The other is the unfinished work in my own career that did not become obvious to me until I lived both with and into the response to my book Why Christianity Must Change or Die.

There is probably no person in the world of Christian scholarship with whom I have felt a closer identification than I did to John A. T. Robinson. We had much in common. He was, as I am, a bishop. Only those of us who have had the privilege of living inside the expectations of that role can fully appreciate the bond that particular shared experience created for us both. He was next an author, seeking as I have done, in book after book to bridge the gap between the Christian academy and the person in the pew. Third, he was, as I am, deeply devoted to the church that he served for a lifetime, but also like me, he was uncomfortable living inside the theological straitjackets that Christianity seems so eager to force upon people in every generation.

Robinson even broke into the consciousness of his nation, just as I did, in a public controversy that grew out of the interface between religion and human sexuality. For him it was his opposition to an effort on the part of the moral purists in the United Kingdom to ban from publication D. H. Lawrence’s book Lady Chatterley’s Lover. For me it was the battle to bring gay and lesbian people fully into the life and love of the body of Christ. John Robinson and I, though separated by a generation, have followed remarkably similar life paths.

It was, however, his little book entitled Honest to God, published in 1963, that shaped my theological journey decisively. This book was launched with a front-page story in the Sunday Observer in Great Britain under the banner headline, Our Image of God Must Go! Robinson’s life would never be the same. This book was a bold blast at the way Christianity had been traditionally understood. It was issued by one who was at that time only an assistant bishop occupying a quite secondary position in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. His title was the Bishop of Woolwich. Woolwich is one of the subdivisions within the Diocese of Southwark, which basically covers the suburbs of London south of the Thames. In this book, Robinson laid out in clear and straightforward language for the average person—whether in the pew or in the Church Alumni Association—the debates going on inside the academy. He introduced his readers to the work of Rudolf Bultmann, who was calling for the scriptures to be demythologized; Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was calling for a Christianity apart from religion; and Paul Tillich, who was insisting that God could no longer be defined personally as a being, but must be approached nonpersonally as the Ground of All Being. The response to this book was tremendous. It was discussed in pubs, with taxicab drivers, at tea, and over dinner, and even in homes where church going had long ceased to be a habit.

But almost immediately the threatened leadership of the traditional church struck back to defend its familiar and dated theological affirmations. Led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey,² the hierarchy decided, in the time-honored manner of defensive people, that since they could neither embrace nor deny Robinson’s message, they must attack the messenger, and attack him they did.

In an outpouring of negativity unprecedented in religious circles until the Muslims put a death price on the head of Salman Rushdie, Robinson was pilloried in the press, in letters to the editor, on radio talk shows, and from the pulpits of that land. Church careers were made by ambitious clergy attacking this young bishop in the name of something called the faith once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 1:3), as if such a body of fixed doctrine had ever existed.

Robinson would now suffer the fate of many a brilliant spiritual leader before him. He was quickly marginalized by his church, avoided by those who once had been his colleagues, and forced to fight to maintain his reputation and integrity. His career in the church was derailed. Normally a person of his age, education, and family background would remain an assistant or area bishop for only a few years before being made the senior bishop of a major diocese. Robinson, however, was clearly destined to be an assistant bishop forever. Finally he resigned from that position in order to return to Cambridge to teach. Even at that great university the long arm of the church was still able to bring its shunning power to bear upon his life. Robinson was never elected by the Cambridge decision makers to the position of university lecturer, despite the fact that he had enjoyed that designation in the 1950s before he was appointed to the bishop’s office. So he lived out his career at Cambridge as the Dean of Chapel at Trinity College, a relatively minor position, usually filled by a recent theological graduate. He died in 1983 largely unappreciated by his church.

Because Robinson was forced after the publication of Honest to God to spend the balance of his life defending himself against the legions of his attackers, he never completed the task that he had begun in that book. Honest to God revealed quite clearly why the God-talk emanating from the church in Robinson’s day was no longer credible in Robinson’s world. It did little, however, except to diagnose the problem and provide a scant outline for a new direction. For this God-filled man, the issue lay not in the reality of God, which he did not question, but in the dated way in which this God had been traditionally proclaimed. Robinson had in fact made major progress in the task of deconstructing the religious patterns of our Christian past. He spelled out quite clearly the easy task of identifying what no longer works. Reconstruction, reformulating the fullness of a faith for tomorrow, however, is incredibly more difficult. Robinson clearly had this task in mind, and the hint of it was seen in his enthusiasm for Bonhoeffer’s call for the church to develop a religionless Christianity, or what Robinson came to call a worldly holiness. But this reconstruction task was never completed. Perhaps it could not have been done at that moment, for it takes time for a new theological language and a new theological atmosphere to develop. Yet the seeds for much of the work I have done in this volume were present in that book. There is no doubt that John Robinson was my ancestor in faith. He was also my spiritual father in whose pathway I have deliberately tried to walk. That reality accounts for half of this book’s origin.

The other half is rooted in the publication of Why Christianity Must Change or Die in 1998. This book was my attempt in a new generation to reissue Robinson’s call for a radical reformation and to face the fact that the premodern biblical and creedal concepts communicate even less well at the end of the twentieth century than they did when Robinson lived. After Why Christianity Must Change or Die came out I drew upon the content of this book to post on the Internet, in Luther-like fashion, twelve theses that I believed needed to be debated as part of that inevitable reformation.³ To elicit the maximum reaction of both affirmation and threat, I stated these theses in the most provocative manner I could imagine. It was a successful tactic. The response to the theses and to the book was quite revealing. In the first fifteen months of that book’s life I received over six thousand letters from my readers. After that the rate slowed a bit but did not stop. The total is to this day still rising and now exceeds ten thousand, a rather remarkable number of letters for a single volume. Clearly my message had struck a chord.

But these responses were different from letters I had received after my other books had been published in more ways than just their numbers. First, they were more positive than negative by about a three-to-one margin. That was a surprise. Normally when one pushes the edges of an existing institution such as the church, as I have done throughout my career, those who feel pushed are the ones who respond by writing, and they tend to do so negatively. In my previous books the negative mail has always out- numbered the positive mail, at least in the beginning. So this was a significant shift in my experience and signaled something new.

The second noteworthy insight from this mail came when an analysis of the letters revealed that the vast majority of the positive responses, perhaps ninety percent, came from laypeople. Some were church dropouts. Some maintained their membership in the institutional church by the slenderest of threads. Some, especially in the more overtly religious parts of our nation and the world, had adopted the stance of being silent participants in the life of their churches, unconvinced but also unwilling to disturb the prevailing values of their communities. These people lived in the Bible Belt of the South, in small towns in the American Midwest, and, surprisingly, in the evangelical regions of Africa. Many of them told stories of a time when they had sought explanations from church leaders but had been informed that any stance other than acquiescence to the revealed truth as taught by the church or affirmed by scripture was sinful behavior.

These letter-writers resonated with my explorations. They found in my words a way to articulate their own faith-questions and to seek new answers. They also found a sense of community with me in my writing, which countered their suspicion that they were somehow peculiar—that is, the only people who felt this way. Time and again these letters expressed some version of the line, If you as a bishop can write and say these things, then perhaps there is still room in the Christian church for someone like me. In many instances these positive letters were long and revealingly autobiographical. It was as if the writers were compelled to tell their life story to someone they felt might understand.

The negative mail, when analyzed, was equally revealing. The hostility contained in the negative letters was overt. I was called by a series of unflattering labels: heretic was one of the nicer ones; atheist, Anti-Christ, hypocrite, deceiver, the Devil incarnate, and ecclesiastical whore were among the more printable of the others. Sometimes these letters included demands that I renounce my office as a bishop and claimed that I should be expelled or deposed from the church if I were unwilling to do so. Some even carried threats of punitive action, including my murder, that the writers either recommended or informed me of their intention of carrying out personally. God had instructed them to do this, many of them stated. However, the most surprising insight that was revealed in this negative mail was not its hostility, but the fact that the vast majority of it, perhaps as high a figure as ninety percent, came from clergy—that is, from the ranks of the ordained.

I found this contrast quite revealing. If ever I observed the deep chasm in understanding that exists in the Christian church in our day, it was here. Ordained people are seen in these responses as defending their turf with vehemence while attacking any proposed changes in their traditional formulations as evil. Laypeople are seen as living on the edges of church life and even dropping out regularly, yet they are still open to receiving new possibilities. Those among my ordained colleagues who responded seemed to be oblivious to the existence of these laypeople, who, though turned off by the small-minded defensiveness of their church leaders, were nonetheless very welcoming of my attempts to speak of God in the accents of a new day to which they could respond. If my ordained friends do not even recognize the problem they face, they can hardly address it.

Time after time when I give public lectures, the response is generally positive from those people who live on or even beyond the fringes of the church, and it is generally negative from those whose identity is somehow defined by the church. An all-clergy group is perhaps my most difficult audience.⁴ I recall one series of lectures that I gave at a well-known eastern university for which a panel of three people had been officially designated to respond at the conclusion of the four-day presentation. One of the panelists was a faculty member at that university, a professor of astronomy. The second was a ranking administrative official from the theological school of a different university in the same city. The third was an Episcopal priest who had formerly been both a seminary faculty member and a missionary in Africa. Their responses amazed me.

The priest was negative, the administrator was both irrelevant and ambivalent, and the astronomer was ecstatic with gratitude. Both the priest and the administrator came with printed manuscripts, which was interesting since this meant that they had prepared their responses prior to hearing my lectures. The priest made statements that were so startlingly a response to perceived threat that I knew he lived in a world that I did not inhabit. He actually praised those who cultivated an anti-intellectual ignorance. His most gratuitous remark was that he knew of no one who used God as a security blanket. The administrator chose this opportunity to make remarks about his understanding of homosexuality, a subject that had not been mentioned in the lectureship, taking a stance quite counter to my own well-known views on this issue. Perhaps he had waited for some time to have such an opportunity. The astronomer alone seemed to recognize the context out of which I was working, to hear the insights I sought to develop, and he expressed himself as filled with appreciation. My words, he said, had helped him move more deeply into his personal attempt to cultivate the life of the spirit.

I am constantly amazed at how threatened ecclesiastical representatives are when they confront the fact that the words they use to tell their faith-story simply no longer communicate meaningfully in the world of today’s experience. Getting angry, being hostile, acting defensively, and engaging in diverting attacks on extraneous issues are responses more symptomatic of the problem than they seem to realize. I knew in that particular experience once more that the audience for whom I seek to write is represented not by the threatened priest but by the questing astronomer. It was fascinating to have the insight I had gained from the mail elicited by Why Christianity Must Change or Die confirmed so vividly in this academic setting.

Following publication of Why Christianity Must Change or Die, I lectured extensively on its content throughout the United States, in Canada, and across England, Scotland, and Wales. In that process, dealing with the questions of my listeners, I inevitably began to develop more fully some of the ideas included in that book. I found my own thought processes stretched into new arenas by this dialogue. Slowly I became aware that I was now walking beyond the traditional safety barriers of my own faith-tradition, barriers that I had heretofore observed. I discovered myself raising questions that I had previously been unwilling even to entertain, and journeying into theological arenas that I had never before entered. It was for me both an exhilarating and a fearful experience.

I began to wonder how I could stay in touch with my increasingly disparate two worlds: the world of the church and the world of my audience. I recalled such colleagues as Don Cupitt in England, Lloyd Geering in New Zealand, and Robert Funk in California, who had clearly arrived at this place before me and who had, I believed, adopted conclusions about the Christian faith that I had not been willing to adopt. Was I now moving toward their life paths and their conclusions? They had in my mind become not just exiles, but willing inhabitants of a post-Christian world with no great need to seek reconciliation with the faith that had nurtured them. I was not sure I wanted to step away from or perhaps even beyond my faith-system as radically as they had done. It was, however, clearly time for me to step beyond both Robinson’s book Honest to God and my own book Why Christianity Must Change or Die. But where this journey would end, I could not guarantee. I went back to the writings of some of my mentors—people such as Paul Tillich in particular, though there were others such as Karl Barth, Don Cupitt, Norman Pittinger, and Richard Holloway—and read their works anew, concentrating this time not on their more popular books but on the writings that marked their lives when they came toward the end of their careers. They clearly had felt many of the same things that I found myself feeling. In their final writings they did not appear willing to be constrained by the traditional boundaries that mark so many representatives of the church. They seemed to have walked the paths that were now so clearly visible to me. Tillich even named one of his final books On the Boundary. Cupitt spoke of After God, and Holloway wrote of godless morality. John Robinson’s widow, Ruth, shared with me some of the unresolved theological issues in his life and in hers.

Those who had so significantly shaped or shared my theological formation did not appear to me to have been willing to stop their pilgrimage into the wonder of God because it had become fearful. They had not stepped back from the levels of honesty that had marked their careers. I knew then that I could not do so either. I too must follow where truth would lead me. Once again, the motto of my theological seminary compelled me: Seek the truth, come whence it may, cost what it will. It is one thing for me not to be able to see the road ahead; it is quite another for me to see it and out of fear to cease my inquiry. I knew that I must continue my pilgrimage, no matter where it led.

The dialogue with my readers and my listeners made many new, unexplored pathways obvious to me. If I refused to take these pathways, it would be to close my mind to new truth, to assume that what I could see was all that could be. That was both intolerable and idolatrous. To suggest that God and one’s own understanding of God are the same is not only to stop growing, it is to die to the quest for truth. If my church were ever to require that of me, it would no longer be a place in which I would want to live. For one who loves the church as deeply as I do, that thought was both a frightening conclusion and an exhilarating experience of freedom.

This was the internal process through which I traveled that caused me to recognize that the conclusions I had reached in Why Christianity Must Change or Die could never be the final conclusions of my life or career. Those earlier conclusions, in retrospect, appeared to be far more preliminary than I had imagined. That book and the dialogue that it created had clearly been door-opening experiences for my readers, and as time went by I was forced to see that they had also become door-opening experiences for me. My task now included an invitation—indeed a responsibility—to walk through the open doors into whatever lay beyond them, whether it proved to be comfortable for me or not.

In that former book I had analyzed effectively and competently, I still think, the profound cultural and theological problems that Christianity faces at this moment of its history. However, it was becoming more and more obvious to me that I had in those pages only begun to show hints, not well-developed ideas, about the evolving directions in which I hoped the Christianity of the future might move. It is amazing how things we think are conclusions get downgraded to hints with the passage of time! The outline of a radically reformed Christianity was present in that volume, but my accomplishment there was far more to show why the old formulas no longer worked than it was to spell out with compelling power the new vision of a reformulated Christianity. That was the incomplete, the unfinished work in my own life that I was now ready to engage. The unanswered questions that had been raised for me by my readers now flooded my mind, crying out to be addressed. What does God look like beyond a dying theism? Does such a God matter? Who is the Christ when traditional concepts such as incarnation, atonement, and the Trinity are no longer usable? Does this figure still command the respect once given to him? Could Christianity survive in a recognizable form if the ref-ormation for which I was calling actually came to pass? Would I too, as many of my colleagues before me had done, end my career either silent before a vision I refused to enter or disillusioned by a church that could no longer either listen or move?

It was while wrestling with these profoundly disturbing issues and while entertaining the dawning awareness out of which these issues were raised that I received an invitation that would alter the course of my life. About a year before the date of my retirement as an Episcopal (Anglican) bishop, a letter arrived from officials at Harvard University inviting me to be the William Belden Noble Lecturer for the year 2000. This appointment was accompanied by an offer to live on the campus in Lowell House as a scholar in residence. Still later, an invitation arrived asking me, while in residence, to teach a class at the Harvard Divinity School. The Noble Lectureship carried with it the requirement that every reasonable effort be made to seek the publication of these lectures.

This was the wonderful, serendipitous opportunity I needed to encourage me to move publicly beyond the limits I had reached in Why Christianity Must Change or Die and to explore more fully the emergence and the shape of what might be called a postmodern Christianity. HarperCollins was eager to bring out a final Spong book that might spell out the future shape of Christianity, so Stephen Hanselman, the publisher, and John Loudon, my editor, immediately offered me a contract. It was at that moment that the two originating streams that would produce this book flowed together, and this present writing venture was born.

All of this is to say that the content of this book began its life as the William Belden Noble Lectures given at Harvard University in March of the year 2000. I have expanded that content in order to provide a proper context for my thinking and to enable me to draw fuller conclusions. I have deliberately sought to walk beyond the traditional boundaries of the Christianity in which I was raised and to develop a new vocabulary, in order to open new avenues into the holy.

I find myself today prepared to join John Robinson by laying the literalness of traditional Christianity aside in order to chart a new Christian future. I am well aware of what this means, and I am quite prepared to absorb the inevitable hostility from those traditional religious people who feel threatened by any challenge to their particular religious system. History teaches me that this response normally accompanies those who step beyond the ancient theological boundaries. I will also seek to move beyond those institutional power-claims by which Christianity has sought to present itself as an exclusive pathway to God. Christianity will always be the pathway to God on which I journey, but I am now convinced that no human system, including Christianity itself, can maintain the exclusive power-claims of its past. The world is far too small today to offer a haven for that kind of tribal religion.

In this Christianity of the future I have also sought to escape the pseudo-security that traditional Christianity has pretended to provide. The God of the everlasting arms who is ready to catch us when we fall (Deut. 33:27) and the Jesus whom we call the Rock of Ages⁵ to whom we will forever cling, both produce, I now believe, an immature person who needs to be taken care of by the supernatural parental deity. That can never be the result of the Christianity I now envision. Rather, I see and welcome a radically new humanity emerging which must live in a religionless world. Dietrich Bonhoeffer observed, in the passage that serves as this preface’s epigraph, Before God and with God we live without God. I find a profound freedom in this newly discovered willingness to embrace the radical insecurity of the human situation. The religious promise to provide the security that enables one to cope with life’s intransigence has become for me nothing more than a delusion designed to keep human beings dependent and childlike. It, like all religious delusions, must be sacrificed if Christianity is to move into the future. As Bonhoeffer described it, this is the time of our coming of age.

In this volume I will seek to articulate a vision of Christianity so radically reformulated that it can live in this brave new world. Yet my hope is also to demonstrate that this Christianity of the future is still in touch with the experience that propelled this faith-tradition into being more than two thousand years ago. This will in all probability be the final theological book of my life and career, and I wanted it to be not an attack on the inadequacy of what is, but a vision of the power of that which might be. I offer it with no ecclesiastical imprimatur. I write only to issue an invitation to come and listen, to explore these possibilities, and to see if by traveling on a new road we can enter the reality of the God beyond theism and hear the voice of Christ speaking in the vocabulary of a post-Christian world. I will leave it to my readers to decide whether or not I have achieved this goal.

I wish to thank Dr. Peter Gomes, the distinguished Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard University and the chair of the William Belden Noble Lectureship, for extending to me the privilege of delivering these lectures at that great center of learning. When I looked over the names of those who had in previous years filled this post and found such gigantic figures as Hans Küng, H. Richard Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, William Temple, and yes, my most admired predecessor, John A. T. Robinson, I was both deeply gratified and profoundly humbled. I also wish to thank Professor Diana Eck of the Harvard University faculty and the Reverend Dr. Dorothy Austin, associate minister at Harvard Memorial Church and associate professor of psychology and religion on leave from Drew University, for extending to my wife, Christine, and to me the joy, the companionship, and the conviviality of residing in the scholar in residence apartment in Lowell House on that campus where they serve as masters. The opportunity to live in this exciting community and to eat our meals with Harvard undergraduates, tutors, and faculty members each day was itself invigorating. Dedicating this book to the three people who made that possible is for me a special pleasure.

As this book was being formulated and written, I was also teaching a class at Harvard Divinity School entitled Issues in Public Preaching. Inevitably, the ideas I was developing for this book came out in my lectures and comments and so had the chance to interact with the thoughts

Reviews for A New Christianity for a New World

[dpdwyer · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Excellent thesis. Too detailed for me.

[greeniezona · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

As you can see, I didn't find this book to be quite as earth-shattering as Why Christianity Must Change or Die. Perhaps it's because I read it with my husband, who was more critical of the way Spong built his arguments. Perhaps it was also because I was often frustrated that I wanted more detail. Spong is taking, and asking his readers to take, a leap of faith. I want a few more straws to grasp at as I do. ;) I want a list of the hymns that he thinks still make sense with a non-theistic understanding of God. I want more solid ideas of how to have a conversation as a non-theist with a traditional believer. For me, this is a matter of spiritual survival, right now. And I was hoping for at least a few easy answers. Though still, I appreciated this book. Perhaps the ground is a little sturdier under my feet for having read it after all.

[dubiousdisciple · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

More than anyone else, Bishop John Shelby Spong has helped shape a new Christianity for a new world. He is a leader in liberal Christianity, and many of us have been following along, reading his books for years. If there’s any cause for frustration with Spong as an author, it’s that he never quite seemed to dig deep enough, to answer the big questions, about where this new, practical, thinking man’s version of Christianity would carry us.If you’ve been yearning to finally get down to the nitty gritty of all the wonderful talk, the time has come. The big questions are answered. How does Christianity survive in a post-theistic world? How does eternity fit into this dream? What about prayer?I think the best way to present this book is just to pass on some of my favorite quotes from the first half of the book. If you find yourself nodding your head, this is the book for you, and the second half will open your eyes.“In the face of religious hostility on one side and incredulous disdain for my unwillingness to reject my faith-tradition on the other, I continue to insist that I am a Christian.”“The audience I seek to address is … people who feel spiritually thirsty but know that they can no longer drink from the traditional wells of the past.”“They will rejoice that they at last have found a way to put their heads and their hearts together.”“People no longer believe in God in a real and operative sense, even if they do continue to believe in believing in God.”“The God who is love is slowly transformed into the love that is God.”“I am free of the God who was deemed to be incomplete unless constantly receiving our endless praises; the God who required that we acknowledge ourselves as born in sin and therefore as helpless; the God who seemed to delight in punishing sinners; the God who, we were told, gloried in our childlike, groveling dependency. Worshiping that theistic God did not allow us to grow into the new humanity that we now claim.”

[pfjden · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

One of the commonest responses to a journey into Jack Spong's theological world is the question: "What is left, which we might recognise as a church, when we've removed all the mythology and wiped away all the dubious interpretation from the Christian tradition?"I was privileged to attend a series of Spong's lectures a few years ago and, as the week progressed, I became aware of a growing 'twitch' among the audience who steadily began to realise that significant chunks of what they identified as their tradition were visibly crumbling in Spong's hands as he held them up to the scrutiny of his thesis. In that same way, this book can have a fascinating yet rather unnerving effect.The book is Spong's attempt to address the question of what is left of 'the church' when Christianity is stripped of its mythology and its various historical and political accretions. Spong also makes a brave attempt to consider what can be offered in place of the beliefs, structures and liturgies which have emerged from the theistic concepts which he targets.As with much of Spong's work, we are on a journey with him towards a destination which is not yet clearly visible, probably not yet even fully constructed when you read how many aspects of Spong's post-theistic 'church' he acknowledges as unknown and unknowable. But it's a journey well worth starting and a territory well worth exploring - strange and unnerving though it may be for those of us prone to the odd 'twitch' when our familiar foundations start to crumble.I would love to see a working model of a cohesive, post-theistic Christian 'ekklesia' which reflects some of Spong's core ideas. My suspicion is that his vision is something which is much easier to embrace as a private theology than it is to develop as a community-based faith - in effect, a personal journey rather than a shared pursuit. This is a critical factor for those who professionally manage those 'shared pursuits' which we presently call 'churches'.I'm sure Spong will have more to say on this, and I do hope some inspiring models will emerge to show us a way forward.